What home improvement work did you do today?

Replaced the blower fan in the clothes dryer. It was the original, so ~35 years old, so I guess it was time, considering it's just a piece of plastic. Dry clothes are happy clothes.

 

What are y'all using for security? I'm looking for something that can be used in all weather, has 5G phone connectivity, and is preferably battery powered/wireless.
It's going above the door on the camper to do double duty as a backup camera.

 

Most products by Arlo are good quality images and connectivity if you can find something from them that meets your parameters...

 

I know a lot of people have arlo and have zero complaints. We bought ring 10 years ago and still have the same stuff still going. Some are wired and some are battery. Connects through the ring app which we can see on our phones.

 

Purely for alarm? Ring Alarm has all the things you want and more, it defaults to cellular backup when internet goes down, and stays up forever on battery when it's not plugged in. Tons of easy to setup wireless sensors. Retrofit kit to use any pre-existing wired door/window contacts. I can speak to great length about the system.

Of course, they have the Ring Doorbell to cover your door. And when you activate their professional monitoring, you get unlimited camera feeds. Ring's spotlight cameras (motion activated, with flood lights) are bang vs. buck some of the best quality wide-angle HD cameras I've been able to find that just WORK. You wire them in, set them, and done. My only gripe is, the Ring cameras will buffer some locally, but can't leverage the ring Cellular data connection when the system goes down. I'm sure they may do it in the future, but ...

I have other stuff I'm using but, hands-down, Ring has the easiest, most-robust selection for quality gear, great support (which you never need to use, shit just works!), easy setup, good smartphone apps and user interfaces...

If it carries any weight, I spent more than 15 years doing all the CCTV / low voltage / network / infra design, deployment for all of our north/south/central America offices. I'm absurdly familiar with access control and CCTV and have worked with dozens of vendors and systems. There's plenty of stuff I'd recommend (Hikvision and Avigilon are ones I've installed at plenty of restaurants/bars for friends/customers which are easy to use), but for residential or SOHO, it's hard to beat what Ring is offering up.

Note: I don't do battery operated cams, so I can't speak to those. I hardwire everything for power. I never got into Arlo, because their only real offerings bitd were stick-up/battery for quite a while, IIRC.

I don't know how this would work in a camper situation though. Maybe Arlo is the way to go if you need wireless.

 

Going to need with it's own power supply or maybe 12V

 

I'm a Ring guy. It seems like their cameras are a little more robust when it comes to heat. I had Google cameras and those pieces of crap were killed by the Texas heat. So far so good with the Rings.

 

I'll second that,I have the ring system, very easy to use you can link camera to camera or camera's which is great coverage with blind spots.
It has served its purpose X times,more than I had anticipated.
My only con on there system the FOV is 110° is great but the optics quality could be better.

 

My best friend next door is anti-Ring after a mediocre experience with their 1st gen doorbell and went SimpliSafe. He couldn’t be happier. Definitely a couple of things he’d like to have, like the ability to use hardwired contacts from his previous his FirstAlert system, and more-compact wireless door/window sensors, but he’s generally really happy with everything else. Has cameras setup internally to watch the dog, those work. Nothing exterior other than the doorbell. And

Truth be told, given how buggy the FirstAlert panel was he had in prior, anything was an improvement. I had the same FA alarm panel prior, the board was overall fine, run of the mill, but lacked any modern function, inability to easily create new door codes or temporary door codes was absurd, and besides the panel, the false alarms from the window sensors whenever the heat would start kicking on later in the year (something about heat made the Reed switches act up in both our houses) were aggravating. SimpliSafe has been flawless for him.

 

But to your point, yeah. I’m not sure what Ring offers in that arena. I know they have battery powered stick-up cams. I know the alarm base station which is also the siren, has an internal battery, but not sure the life beyond “at least 10 hours” we’ve had it offline during power fails. I know they have a plethora of wireless sensors, and I know the base has cellular backup. If you have any sort of plan with Verizon or T-Mo or similar, to add a hotspot for primary internet, that would cover most of the bases. It maybe worth looking into. The system has been a total no-brainer for us, and worked flawlessly thus far.

 

I have a mix of hardwired and stick up cams. The stick up cams are pretty nice for a battery powered option. I have a few extra batteries so I can easily swap them out when necessary and not have to wait for the batteries to recharge. Ring app gives me a notification when the battery is low as well.

 

Do you need a subscription to service to use the ring cams or can I just get a camera and use it? Can they be pulled up demand? Forgive my ignorance y'all.

This is what I'm looking at... Good/bad/ or meh?



An arlo knockoff from what I can tell

 

Worth noting also, there are different types of wired vs. wireless. You've got cameras that are wired to house power. You have cameras that are wired to a 12v or 24v power supply (Altronix is usually who I used for power cans). You have cameras that are POE, and get power over a standard CAT5/CAT6 feed from a POE switch or injector.

I've never tried it, but I'd be curious to know if any of the older style coax/BNC cameras that ran off 12V power/24v power could be retrofitted to run in a camper off the 12v power supply? But then you'd still need something to capture and store the signal, DVR/NVR or similar.

Ring requires a subscription if you want to store content. It's been so long since I've not had a subscription with them, though, that I don't know if they support connecting to a camera thru the app remotely w/o having a camera.

 

I'd have to ask my wife what we pay for a subscription but I think it is around $10 a month. She pays all of our bills though so I'm not entirely sure on the cost.

 

One feature I like is having the door locks set up to turn off of the alarm when I put the code in to unlock them.

 

That sounds about right.

 

technology will never cease to amaze me. I'm still using a key to unlock my doors though. We do have one door on the house that has a keypad to enter a code that will allow access to unlock without a key. However, at times when it's really cold out the pad will register the code but the lock won't turn. I'll probably change that lock back to a simple keyed lock again.

 

I can't even get the keypad on our garage to work half the time

 

We have the Xfinity security and like it as I get notices on my phone for the cameras. We paid $$$ for the system a few years ago. I pay the extra 10 $ a month for video capture. All the doors and accessible windows have switches also. We have a relatively safe neighborhood but I like the phone notification when a delivery is put on the porch.

They don’t ring the doorbell anymore for deliveries. Wife orders a LOT of stuff on line. We did have a car with a runner jumping out and checking cars (at 5:30am) a few weeks ago. (Our vehicles are in the garage). My camera recorded the guy jumping out and checking the neighbor’s cars. I like the ability to view the cameras at any time also.

We also have a bare minimum Ring system. A couple of door switches, movement sensor, an indoor camera, 2 leaks sensors, and a listener to the fire alarm system. The insurance company paid 99% of the cost, as they discontinued the Hedge system support and discount. I liked the Hedge system but was buggy. Anyways, I basically have it enabled for the fire alarm listening, it will notify the fire dept if a fire breaks out. Hence the insurance incentive. The insurance company paid for the first year monitoring fee. I supposedly get a 5 % discount on the house insurance premium which would pay for the monitoring fee. I kinda like the system, but it does not cover the outside with cameras or windows unless we add to the system. I’ll probably keep it going for the insurance discount. One thing I don’t like is I cannot view the indoor camera unless the alarm is activated. Maybe I don’t have it set right…. Maybe in the future I’ll switch to a ring system only, but that will be $$$ for additional cameras and windows’ sensors.

 

Still on hard keyed doors here. If you want to get into my house, you'll need to manually pick the lock, which isn't hard to do. One of our IoT security teams (former employer was a huge MSS provider for Americas + EU + APAC) had several major name smart locks and smart bulbs in our office for 6 months and it was a running joke, even the interns they refreshed every 3-6 months were able to defeat the smart locks in under 1 day, then could repeat the results with any subsequent lock within a minute or so. Won't even get into the smart light bulbs. That was a joke.

Anyway, keyed locks for me. No smart bulbs or smart outlets. No cheap Chinesium smarthome stuff either, and in the event anything I use is sourced from there, it goes on a separate VLAN/wifi SSID than our trusted devices.

 

Well that settles it then. Back to keyed locks for that door. In theory we changed it so the kids could get in without having them lose a key. But you bring up some valid points.

 

I mean, it is what it is. I refuse to make the leap. We're in a high-density area, more people = more opportunity. Cities always have more opportunistic crime.

Our friends next door have a digital lock and nobody's tried anything hinky. We all have door jamb reinforcements, since kick-ins were really popular starting 2007-2008ish in my area, and still happen today. If they want in, they'll get in, I guess. I just feel like analog is more difficult. People (young ones especially) are great with technology, but hand them a tool, like a lockpick set, and they don't understand. "Does this work with Siri?"

I kid. Sort of.

 

What are these door jam reinforcements you speak of?

 

This is what comes to mind...



probably more stealth though. Guess the ATL needs something a lil different than what I'm used to in the mtns.

 

Totally get your philosophy living in the city. Laughed my ass off at your kids these days joke.